RPBP News

Featured discussion topic of the week - Author Profile Pictures - Informal or Formal?This is an important and hard truth that most authors avoid:Readers will judge you, and your book, based on your author photo.Is that fair? Maybe not. Is it reality? Absolutely (and you probably do it as well).Why do people do this? It’s mostly unconscious, and evolved as a way for humans to quickly assess threats, opportunities and determine relative social status of a new person to know how to interact with them. A deep discussion of this topic is far beyond the scope of this piece, but basically, snap judgements based on appearance evolved because it works (there is a ton of research and science on this, and most of it falls under what is called “signaling theory”).Because everyone on earth is like this (and most of us don’t even realize it), you need to really pay attention to your author photo, and make sure you do it right. In this piece, I’m going to walk you through exactly how to do that.But first, I’ll show you several examples of author photos, both good and bad, and break them down for you. Then I’ll give you one key guiding rule for author photos (or any profile photos, like those on LinkedIn), along with a broad set of rules and guidelines you can use to create your own great looking author photo.Continue reading and view the examples hereRe-blogged from http://bookinabox.com/how-to-take-an-author-photo/

So which photo do you think is the better author image and why? Do you think either of them should be used and why? Leave us a comment and share with your friends so they can be involved too!

For the purposes of this discussion we will use the two people that run this blog; author's Sarah Jane Butfield & Margaret A. Daly.